Midwest-Based Agriculture Marketing Company Serving a Global Market

Faced with growing demand for the over 100 products the company provides, as well as the paperwork and documentation involved in contracting and accounting transactions, this century-old company realized that the old way of doing business simply wasn’t measuring up.

They began to look for innovative ways to manage, secure and distribute the documents and information that supported this ever-growing base of business. Ultimately, the decision was made to implement a FileBound® On-Demand™ document management solution to meet their needs.

Customer Profile

A Midwest-based ag marketing company serving a global market. They are one of the top 100 privately held corporations in the U.S. in size and most recently reported annual revenues in excess of 4 billion. They also have over 500 employees located in 65 facilities.

Business Challenge

The company was using a paper-based filing system and finding it increasing hard to meet the needs of the organization and control costs at the same time. A primary issue involved the inconsistency of processes across the organization, which were leading to errors, delays in access to information, run away costs and scalability issues. Documents were stored in different locations using different filing methods making access difficult and costly.

Solution

A FileBound On-Demand hosted solution was quickly provisioned and implemented to meet their document management needs. With the system in place, large volumes of mainframe printouts were eliminated by automatically reproducing them as images and storing them on the system. This not only reduced the cost of creating and distributing the paper reports but also provided secure, instant access to any user that needed them, regardless of their location. The system also allowed the company to implement processes for contract approvals using the integrated workflow tools. FileBound also allowed them to develop document management standards across the enterprise for addressing user access rights, document approval rules, and document retention. The company was able to integrate document searching from within their IBM AS400 based core business applications. This allowed for seamless document access from within user interfaces that users were already familiar with, which resulted in minimal training and quick adoption.

Benefits

As a result of implementing the FileBound On-Demand solution, the company was able to successfully rollout a consistent document management strategy. This strategy resulted in improved decision making, predictable cost and better document access. The quick implementation of a hosted solution without a large capital investment exceeded their ROI expectations and has resulted in the kind of organizational scalability that has them poised to take advantage of new opportunities as they present themselves across the globe.